Tag: Authenticity

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Pizza Hut: The Best Indian Food Around

 pizza

I had the good fortune to be able to accompany a group of my students on a short-term study abroad trip to India last year.  It’s perhaps no surprise that, while there, I consumed a lot of Indian food.  On the surface, that last sentence may seem rather ridiculous if only because it seems so obvious — much like saying “While in India, I saw Indian things!”  But an event on our trip forced me to reconsider just how simple that observation really is, and where the parameters surrounding “authentic” and “traditional” cultural labels really lie. Continue reading “Pizza Hut: The Best Indian Food Around”

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Who Are You? I’m A Nervous Flyer

Airplane

“Who Are You?” asks members of Culture on the Edge to reflect on one of their own many identities (whether national, gendered, racial, familial, etc.), theorizing at the same time the self-identification that they each chose to discuss.

Preparing for Departure: I Knew I Knew You!

I’m am extremely nervous flyer. Walking onto a plane – and preparing for the anxiety of the flight – I enact rituals of certainty. Such practices don’t begin on the plane. They commence in the airport once I’ve arrived at my gate. I might call them rituals of identification for in turning myself into data as often as I do when I’m enacting such practices, I am clear that such things rely on the strategies I enact in reading other people (for my own purposes) – i.e., ones that often involve strategies such as authenticity and strategic essentialism as I scan the crowd trying to take stock of the “who” I might be in company with on the plane. In being a nervous flyer and by reflexively examining my practices, I seemingly learn more about this thing we call identity – how I catalogue others for my own social interests (i.e., protection and safety) and thus, how others read me back. Continue reading “Who Are You? I’m A Nervous Flyer”

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Runnin’ Away With Me…

Elevation Church photography

If you happen to think that all social life — including our emotional responses to situations — is, for lack of a better word, manipulated to one degree or another, whether by intention (e.g., another social actor’s rhetoric) or non-agential structures in which we live and move (e.g., the rules of grammar, class relations, nationalism, etc.), then a headline like “How Elevation Church, Pastor Furtick produce ‘spontaneous’ baptisms” will probably strike you as curious for reasons far different from how many others read it. Continue reading “Runnin’ Away With Me…”

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Keep Your Stick on the Ice

Picture 6Each New Year’s day, since 2008, two National Hockey League teams face-off — as they say — in an outdoor game that’s called the Winter Classic. This year, the first to include a Canadian team (another older but more infrequently played series, called The Heritage Classic, has pitted two Canadian teams against each other), was between the Detroit Red Wings and the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Leafs won 3-2 in a shoot-out after the overtime sessions didn’t decide it. (Go Leafs.)

The thing that’s interesting about this game is the way that it quite successfully markets nostalgia, such as the custom-made vintage uniforms they all wear and the “old timers” game between long retired NHL players that’s also part of the weekend’s activities — a point nicely identified by a friend on Facebook during the game, who noted the wonderful contradiction between the old school “leather” look of the goalie pads and gloves but the modern high-tech helmets and visors the players were all still wearing. Continue reading “Keep Your Stick on the Ice”

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In the Eye of the Beholder

edgemonkcell

A graduating senior in our Department recently wrote a very nice blog post, for our Department’s site, on how disappointed a friend of hers, whom she had met while traveling in India, was when discovering a Buddhist monk using a cell phone. (Read her blog post here.) I posted a link to the article on a Facebook group devoted to the History of Religions — a group that, despite being some people’s preferred technical name for our academic discipline, has attracted a diverse membership. Someone in the group, having read the post, soon commented on how a monk with a cell phone was evidence of decay in religions. Continue reading “In the Eye of the Beholder”

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“Don’t Look Back, You Can Never Look Back”

Boys of SummerYes, I’m now old enough to remember things that some around me have never heard of — no, not the Hindenburg disaster but, say, lighter moments from popular culture. For example, a niece who used to keep me updated on cool music that I ought to be aware of (she was my own personal fountain of youth, in other words), once told me about The Ataris. Continue reading ““Don’t Look Back, You Can Never Look Back””